Wednesday, June 20, 2012

I've recently completed a new Jauck style lute. I haven't kept up my posting here. Last year was a time of reworking old methods and trying to come up with new more efficient ones. It was also a time of many, many repairs that were very intriguing. I should post some of this work, if i can only get to it. I don't necessarily like to advertise repair work. I find it very challenging and not very rewarding depending on the nature of the work. Mostly because the lutes are typically from a variety of makers using sometimes surprising methods and adhesives. Many are bought inexpensively but need significant work to make them playable. It can be a time of discovery coupled with persistent problem solving. For now, I leave it at that. Contemporary and more costly lutes generally have less severe problems and repair is usually limited to soundboard cracks and loose bars, etc..

 I have many new exciting projects to work on this year and hope to report on them in due course. I've mentioned  I have come up with new to me methods, as you will see. The first, important discovery is doing away with gluing my rose patterns on the soundboard altogether. You subsequently have to remove them. This is a waste of time for me. The method of gluing the pattern on can result in a warped soundboard. This is not necessarily a problem. It will be made flat again by gluing the bars on. In fact under the rose a reinforcing paper does need to be glued on. Hide glue has this nasty habit of shrinking rapidly as the water evaporates from the film. This inevitably distorts your pattern and subsequent operations like carving round border rings will show how elliptical your pattern has become. Many lute makers avoid this by gluing their pattern from behind which will be left and altering adhesives and how dilute or not to make them. I don't like the idea of carving the rose from the back side. But, mostly because I just haven't tried it. I interject here, lute making as with many other endeavors, is a constantly evolving process. I'm completely sure, that whatever I post here could and will likely change as the process evolves. So then, Perhaps If i can keep up to date, this blog might be a running database of such changes. Its equally likely that I will pick up something entirely different like a Neapolitan mandolin perhaps! Indeed, I will be building one and should report on it here.

Here I have printed my drawing straight to the soundboard. No pattern to remove. No warping soundboard. and No elliptical designs. The drawing will go away once the relief carving operation is finished. So, I have eliminated some part of the process that is nerve wracking. I've also sped things up slightly, with the added bonus of being able to see what your doing without the paper blinding your view.




another improvement is using vacuum pressure for veneering the backs of lute necks which you can see here.
 



And using air pressure in the form of an air bladder constricting the fingerboard to the neck core. This was very tricky to work out and get something that wasn't deformed. Because, unlike vacuum you can apply an enormous amount of force. As usual the neck core is what receives the curved shaping. You bend the ebony fingerboard around this. My first incarnation of this setup was the air bladder and hardboard were on top with the coated fabric around the back of the neck. This however, didn't allow the edges of the fingerboard to clamp down tight because there was as much force pulling up as was pushing down by the bladder. This inevitably canceled each other out leaving gaps along the edges.

These next images are just shop typical photos of cutting the extension out. Nothing extraordinary here. Travis Carey does a much finer job of documenting this process so I'll direct you to view that. No need for redundancy there.



















A final couple images. The first after gluing the soundboard on. The second a stage photo while varnishing. This post does very little to show the process this lute undertook from lumber to instrument. and more about unique challenges, and admittedly modern solutions to an ancient craft. I am presently under the persuasion that I need to get more done. As I have heard in other situations, I might be inclined to think. The lute doesn't really care how it got here, so long as the methods don't necessarily violate acoustic and historical design principles.